Security analysis of SVD-based watermarking techniques
Victor Pomponiu, Davide Cavagnino · International Journal of Multimedia Intelligence and Security · 2011
Digital watermarking is a widely adopted solution to ownership protection and authentication of multimedia contents, such as images and videos. In the last years, the well-known numerical tool called singular value decomposition (SVD) received much attention from the watermarking community. Many schemes showing good performances in terms of robustness, capacity and imperceptibility have been devised. However, few of these schemes take into consideration another crucial constraint, the security , which guarantees the usability of the watermarking technology. This paper shows that most of the watermarking schemes based on SVD are insecure and cannot be used for applications that require ownership protection and authentication. This is due to the fact that the space where the watermark resides, i.e., the embedding space, can be estimated and the watermark removed or overwritten. To motivate our findings, two different attacks that remove the watermark while minimising the distortion were developed. The attacks were employed on several test images, being able to remove the watermark with low distortions.